1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates generally to the field of secure electronic messaging, and in particular to processing secure messages to verify and separately indicate signature status and trust status of the messages.
2. Description of the Related Art
Known secure messaging software clients, such as e-mail software applications operating on desktop computer systems, represent the status of a signature on a received secure message using a single icon or other type of signature indicator that indicates whether the signature is valid or not. The overall process of signature verification by these clients typically involves multiple operations, such as mathematical operations to verify the signature status, and a check of trust status. When signature verification fails, however, a user of these known clients is unable to immediately determine the reason for the failure, and which of the signature verification operations failed, due to the fact that the client only provides a single signature verification indicator (i.e. valid or invalid). Therefore, when a signature verification process fails, the user cannot distinguish whether the failure was caused by a mathematical operation failure or by a trust status check failure.